Klarinet Archive - Posting 000542.txt from 2005/03

From: <skywinkle@-----.net>
Subj: [kl] that nice dark sound
Date: Mon, 21 Mar 2005 18:31:08 -0500

Terms like bright and dark take on a limited degree of usefulness only in a relative context. Any absolute definition of sound involving human hearing is meaningless, as the tools used in the measuring (ears, brain, etc.) never remain constant. There is no way to know if the sound of your 2000 HZ sine wave is perceived by me to be exactly the same. Or if yesterday's hearing is perceived to be the same as today's. But if we can agree on two extremes, fingers on a blackboard are bright, that boom box racket coming from the car behind us is dark, then we can make a stab at positioning other sounds in between, all the while realizing as the sounds get closer together in character, our labels become fuzzier and lose more and more of their meaning.

>
> From: "dnleeson" <dnleeson@-----.net>
> Date: 2005/03/21 Mon PM 05:49:40 EST
> To: <klarinet@-----.org>
> Subject: RE: [kl] that nice dark sound
>
> I'm sure you do. However, what you hear as a dark sound someone
> else can very well hear as a bright sound. So the dark sound that
> you are hearing is not constant from listener to listener. And
> that failure make the term worse than useless.
>
> The purpose of a word to describe a phenomenone should, in
> principle, be defined the same for everyone.
>
> Dan Leeson
> DNLeeson@-----.net

-------------------------------------------------------------------
Klarinet is a service of Woodwind.Org, Inc. http://www.woodwind.org